BPT Partners Launches CRM Certificate

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a hot issue in the information technology industry these days, but there aren’t really a lot of training and certification opportunities in this sphere available to IT professionals right now. A new online offering from BPT Partners, an organization established by CRM experts, provides them with a much-needed resource in this area.

“We’re all wonderfully served by this industry, and this is an opportunity for us to contribute in a positive way,” said Bruce Culbert, managing partner and one of the founders of BPT Partners. “We’re a training and education company. We also do research and consulting, but our primary focus is to leverage all the best practices, years of experience and unique approaches and bring that together in a series of training and education offerings.”

The e-learning course, titled Certification in Applied CRM, features five modules that address five key issues involved in creating and executing a successful CRM strategy: strategy fundamentals, strategy deployment and application, delivering value propositions to the customer, change management, and technology selection and implementation. Participants are issued a certificate upon completion. “In this particular instance, it’s more of a completion criterion versus an examination criterion,” Culbert said. “There are a couple of drivers for that. As we go forward, testing competencies at the end is something we certainly want to do, but we want to have the lowest barrier to entry for professionals to be able to avail themselves from this.”

This program started out when BPT Partners sought to build a consensus on standards, competencies and best practices in the CRM discipline, Culbert said. “We’re actively engaged in the standards work of the various industry associations and research institutes. We’re participating to try to create some momentum around a set of standards for taxonomy and approaches so that it’s easier to do business and so we can have a platform for developing competencies in our industry. As we continued to push for grassroots industry (standards), we kept getting feedback from the industry that said, ‘You are the standard. Why don’t you just go do this?’”

Thus, the members of BPT Partners decided to institute a training program around those principles. “We took the first program on the road and did it as a seminar series in nine cities around the globe including Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong and a few cities in the States. We matured it, vetted it and solidified it. At the conclusion of that, we sat down with our partners—RWD Technologies, our learning services company—and packaged that series into an e-learning program,” Culbert said.

BPT Partners’ Certified CRM training is now available at RWD Technologies’ University 360 e-learning Web site.